This is Sitting Queerly, a newsletter focused on the late blooming queer experience, the lofty goal of opening up conversations and celebrating those who embrace their full selves.
To start, let me just say that reading books and acquiring books are two mutually exclusive hobbies.
While I’ve always loved reading, my eyes are indeed bigger than my attention span or the number of hours in a day. Even though we cull our personal library regularly, my wife and I currently have nearly 1,300 volumes in our house1. We just can’t pass up picking up one or a dozen at library book sales or perusing Powell’s when in Portland. My wife’s point of view is that it’s not that we have too many books, we just don’t have enough bookshelves.
Regardless, my reading hasn’t kept up, especially as I have sought to add more queer titles to my unending TBR pile. However, I did manage to get through about a dozen this year, which is better than years past. I’ve written about a few of them already in some way and will link to those past newsletters. Otherwise, here’s a rundown of what I read and what I thought of them.
All links to where you can buy the books online are to bookshop.org, a more ethical and small business friendly bookseller than that One Website That Sells Everything. You can even select a local small bookstore in your community to receive a portion of any purchase you make if they are part of Bookshop’s member store list. If you don’t have a local bookstore, might I suggest you designate Flagship Books of Kansas City, Kan., or Adventures Underground of Richland, Wash., as the beneficiary of your purchases.
Books I’ve Written About Already
The Creative Act: A Way Of Being
As I am wont to do, I had a routine creative crisis this past winter/spring and made you all hear about it while writing about this critically-acclaimed book.
Surviving The Future: Abolitionist Queer Strategies
I wrote about this book of collected essays when I gained a (misplaced!) shred of hope for our country but I still wanted to be prepared for the worst (which turned out to be prescient of me!)
This first book in an already popular series provided some perspective for a piece I wrote about “third places” in the context of finding your queerness late in life. Three words: Queer. Werewolf. Porn.
Other Books I Finished
Societies in which magic was dominant were not harmonious and peaceful, because of their state of oneness with the universe. There was considerable violence, social collapse and disruption. They certainly do not represent a state to which we can return, even if we should wish to. However, magic is a strand in the long-term history of humanity, and it has important work to do in allowing us to explore our closeness with reality, in providing a useful complement and counter-balance to the more distancing attitudes of religion and science. A choice between these three is neither necessary nor desirable.
I picked this up at a favorite bookstore on the Oregon coast a couple years ago while vacationing with family. Magic/esotericism has fascinated me for a long time, particularly from an anthropological as well as spiritual perspective. This was a pretty dense text, written in an academic style, which is why it took me most of 2023 to read it before finishing it last winter. Still, I feel the author was very thorough and did a good job of showing how magic is really a facet of human experience intersecting with religion and science rather than opposing them.
I kinda read this out of obligation, like, I couldn’t claim to be queer if I didn’t read it. I actually wasn’t wowed by it and I plan to write about it in relation to ‘coming out’ stories. But, it wasn’t bad; it did keep me reading and on the edge of my seat at times.
When I was talking with a secular activist earlier this year, she told me, “I don’t know what you expect; the church is a conquered people. They have signed a treaty with the state, and for staying out of trouble they get their tax exemption.” My experience with the [World Council of Churches] and other church bodies has made me wonder, sadly, if perhaps this is true.
I got this book several years ago when two Native American individuals spoke at our church. I found it an interesting perspective on the issue of colonialism and genocide of Native American, First Nations and other indigenous peoples of the new world. Given how much the Christian faith was used to justify the atrocities visited upon those peoples, the author’s commitment to the faith herself while trying to rally other Christians to see the moral imperative of addressing the damage of the doctrine of discovery or manifest destiny was compelling.
My mother had explained to me that buildings needed human breath in them to keep them moist and held together. Abandoned buildings are like abandoned people—they die sooner.
Got this at Fabulosa Books in the Castro while at San Francisco Pride this past summer. It’s a very minimalist and raw book and reads more like individual vignettes than a novel. I loved it.
I’ve been a fan of Michael Chabon for a while, even though I only recommend one of his books to folks (Summerland) and not any of the ones he’s known best for. This was a bit of a slog, as there’s a lot of flashback/flashforward action. But family drama always gets me, and there’s plenty of that here.
My Strange Fiction professor first introduced me to Chris Ware when she had us read Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Boy In The World. I’ve loved his work ever since as I very much identified with his cynical, dark and brutally honest take on people and their relationships. And yet, his style of illustration can be so utterly beautiful and engrossing. And despite that cynicism, the end of Rusty Brown is a tearjerker.
Hokusai: Inspiration & Influence
Harry and I went and saw the exhibition about the well-known ukiyo-e artist behind “The Great Wave Off Kanagawa” this book focuses on. I love treatments on creative individuals, seeing their unpublished work, learning about their contemporaries and their relationships with them. Again, a bit academic but it was still enjoyable.
Another book I picked up on the Oregon coast and an Oregon author at that. The introduction compares his standing in Oregon letters as comparable to that of Ken Kesey (without ever mentioning Brian Doyle) so take that with a grain of salt. The story didn’t seem to have a direction for the first chapter or two—it’s a short book, only 200+ pages—but the action/tension arrives quickly before coming and going in waves. On a certain level the ending is anticlimactic but I don’t see how else it could have ended.
Rather late,
the people grew alarmed.
My wife gave me this for Christmas last year. I grew up with and love Calvin and Hobbes and given that Bill Watterson hadn’t published anything in, well, forever, I had put this on my list I gave her. It is very much outside the work of his I loved. It’s minimalist, more of a coffee table book about a parable. Not sure I would ask for it based on what I know about it now.
Did Not Finish
I think I made it about a quarter through this. The bits about the actual artist the author is related to were very interesting. The parts where she related that artist’s life to her own bored me.
Confession: this was my first experience reading anything by Ta-Nehisi Coates. I am ashamed to admit that, as I’ve heard great things about his writing for The Atlantic. But this was not the best introduction for me. He’s clearly a gifted writer, can paint a scene, great at character development. But the pacing of The Water Dancer is so. Damn. Slow. I suspect it was intentional, to match it’s antebellum South setting, but it made me fall asleep. He also used some very specific vernacular—again, to reflect the setting—that made it hard to follow.
Do Not Recommend
Butterflies In Heat
There are two reasons there is no link to purchase this book. 1) it’s not available via Bookshop and 2) it is trash. The organizers of the conference for late-blooming men I went to in October 2023 had an assortment of used queer books free to take and this was one of the volumes I picked up. Another (much older) attendee remarked that he had loved it and that it was very formative to his coming out. It was even endorsed by Tennessee Williams! But it is trash. There is no real plot and the protagonist is barely likable, much less any of the other characters. It uncreatively relies on every cliche, stereotype, prejudice and innuendo equated with queerness, in a very dated way. The author was better known for being not much more than a gossip columnist, and this book makes that painfully evident.
This does not include our kids’ own growing libraries nor the massive collection of saved issues of Aperture, The New Yorker, etc.
My to-be-read-pile is always far, far bigger than my have-read pile! thanks for sharing these.